Melissa Etheridge

• Date of birth: May 29, 1961
• Coming-out party: Etheridge publicly announced that she is a lesbian at the 1993 Triangle Ball inauguration party for President Bill Clinton.
• Baby-daddy bombshell: She and her former partner, Julie Cypher, revealed in a 2000 Rolling Stone story that rock star David Crosby is the biological father (sperm donor) of their two kids.
• Celebrity wedding: Etheridge and partner Tammy Lynn Michaels had a commitment ceremony in 2003. The guests included Jennifer Aniston, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Al Gore, Sally Field, Ellen DeGeneres, Helen Hunt, Mike Myers, Christina Applegate and Sheryl Crow.
• Her favorite star at the Oscars: “Clint Eastwood. He walks by me and sees me, and he makes his hand like a gun and says, ‘Hey, kid, you’re new around here, aren’t you?’ And I melted and thought, 'Now that’s what being at the Oscars is all about.'”

Melissa Etheridge’s life changed forever in 2004, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She canceled a tour, underwent chemotherapy and made a triumphant return to the stage at the 2005 Grammy Awards, where she performed “Piece of My Heart” — and bravely so, since she had lost all her hair from the treatment.

This year, Etheridge, 46, is back in the spotlight again. In February, she won an Oscar for best original song for “I Want to Wake Up,” from Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” She also made a high-profile appearance at Gore’s all-star, international Live Earth concert event on July 7 to raise awareness about environmental causes.

And there’s also her latest album, appropriately titled “The Awakening,” which is her first collection of new songs since surviving breast cancer and getting a new lease on life.

“When I came out of the experience of cancer and chemotherapy,” Etheridge says in an exclusive interview with LifetimeTV.com, “it taught me that I shouldn’t do anything that I don’t love completely.”

She continues, “I went into making ‘The Awakening’ with that [attitude], and I started writing what I love. It was a joy from beginning to end, and that was a complete thrill.”

“The Awakening” has songs that represent personal introspection, but also includes some biting social commentary about war.

The singer reveals, “After having chemotherapy and finally getting healthy, I read everything: quantum physics to string theory to cosmology and Plato. And I really found spirituality in myself and in my soul … I think we’re all meant to go through a spiritual awakening. That’s where I’m at right now.”

In addition to dealing with her breast cancer, Etheridge says that one of the hardest things she’s had to do is balance her career with raising her kids. She has four children, including 10-year-old daughter Bailey and son Beckett (who turns nine this November) from her relationship with former partner Julie Cypher. On October 17, 2006, Etheridge and her current partner, actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, welcomed into the world fraternal twins: daughter Johnnie Rose and son Miller Steven.

“Family affects every single choice I make and every single thing I do,” Etheridge says. “We have to balance everything out. Having kids changes everything. My priority is my family, period. I make enough money where we’re all comfortable. I never want to go make money instead of being with my kids. That’s not okay. I’m not a pained, lonely musician out on the road. I used to be. But I’m different now. I’m now a mother understanding the meaning of life and looking to walk that every day.”

Because family is a top priority for her, Etheridge says she will only tour in the summer, when her kids are out of school. Her next tour will be in the summer of 2008.

So much has changed in Etheridge’s life that if she wanted to, she could literally write another memoir. Her first autobiography, “The Truth Is…,” was published in 2002. It’s a warts-and-all look at her life, including Etheridge claiming that she was molested as a child by her older sister, and detailing her painful and public breakup with Cypher.

If Etheridge were to write another book, she reveals, “I don’t know what the title would be. I just know that the first line would say, ‘The truth is, [The person I am now] didn’t write my last book.’ There’s still some fear in that book. What happened was when I started writing the book, I thought it was going to be a book about the songs I had written and that it would be kind of a fan thing. And then I went through my breakup while I was writing the book. So I would just talk into this tape recorder and it just became therapy of my life … I just barfed all of it out in that book. And I haven’t gone back and read it. I’m afraid to. That book is truthful. But it’s kind of a surface truth, and there’s more to it. Sometimes we can’t even speak our truth until we’re years out of it.”

For now, Etheridge isn’t looking back; she’s living in the present. And she says the most emotionally inspiring part of her journey through breast-cancer recovery has been the support she’s gotten from loved ones and strangers.

She elaborates, “I’ll be waiting in line somewhere and someone will come up to me and say something like, ‘My mother’s a breast cancer survivor.’ There’s a cancer community out there and I’m part of that now.”